Disco Elysium Review - Page 4
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As a whole package, Disco Elysium is masterfully made and radiates charm. For a game that throws lots of text at you, it doesn't feel overwritten. You never feel like you're being encircled by pointless walls of text. The dialogues are punchy and flow naturally, and the lore dumps are only there if you go looking for them. And for the first time in I don't know how many years, instead of doing my best to skip all the useless lore, I was actively trying to learn things about Disco Elysium's intriguing world.
The game also tracks the passage of time, but it doesn't rush you. Time passes only during conversations, which leaves you free to explore the world at your own pace. On top of introducing a day/night cycle and timed quests, the passage of time also has the added benefit of gradually changing the overall mood of the game. On the first day, after you have just woken up, you're extremely confused and don't know much about anything. This opens up the possibility for learning about the world and leads to plentiful humorous, and oftentimes ridiculous, situations. Then, as you get your bearings and get a chance to sleep things off, the game's tone shifts ever so slightly and becomes more of a straight detective story with just some bits of craziness on top.
Unfortunately, the game can't keep this up and at some point it starts to run out of steam, putting you on a fairly linear path by the very end. Not knowing all the details, I blame this on a lack of budget, as it almost feels like there should have been more content in the final act. Prior to launch, the developers estimated the game's length at around 60 hours. In reality, it's closer to 30. If I'm being honest, I don't see a game like this maintaining the same level of quality over 60 hours, so that's not the problem. I just wish that the final act offered us a bit more freedom.
Another thing that may have suffered due to budgetary constraints are the animations. The ones that exist in the game are top notch. Tight, believable, and fun to observe. But while your character and his partner get plenty of varied animations, with some notable exceptions NPCs remain static and only move to new spots when you're not looking.
Then, there's the final showdown. While the game doesn't have a proper combat system, it has some instances of physical conflict that get resolved through text-based dice rolls. Near the end, you and your partner will find yourself in the midst of a volatile standoff. You'll be throwing dice after dice to try and diffuse the situation and once diplomacy fails and bullets start flying, you'll do even more frantic rolling to try and get through this firefight in one piece.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, this is the only such high-stakes fight present in the game. I wish there were more. But even so, the game doesn't feel unfinished, and that's perhaps the most important thing. And when you notice that your character's head follows the cursor as you explore, well that's just a nice bonus.
Technical Information
For being created by a bunch of artists, the game is surprisingly well-polished on the technical side of things. During my playthrough I didn't encounter any game-breaking bugs, or any bugs at all for that matter. The game crashed on me once, but that's it. Amazed at the fact that a game can launch in our day and age without being a buggy mess, I looked it up online, and as it turns out, others have been encountering some minor issues here and there, but nothing too major from what I can tell.
At the same time, I really wasn't happy with the Options menu. It's absolutely barren. You can't even limit the frame rate in-game, not even through Vsync. And with this being a Unity Engine title, you really need that feature, otherwise your graphics card will try to push the FPS to infinity and in the process get hotter than it has any right to be. In my experience, all Unity Engine games suffer from this problem and Disco Elysium is no exception. Thankfully, I was able to enable Vsync through the Nvidia control panel, but that's a workaround for something that should have been in the game.
There's also no way to rebind keys and in order to learn which key does what, you need to first start playing and then press F1. But hey, at least you can customize the font size. Plus, the game is fairly quick to save and load. And the save system is pretty robust, featuring manual saves, quick saves, and autosaves.
Finally, this being a text-heavy game, when it comes to typos, there are enough of them to be noticeable, but not enough to get really annoying.
Conclusion
If you decide to play Disco Elysium, chances are it will resonate with you unlike any video game that came before it. And if not, at the very least you'll be getting a great hard-boiled mystery powered by a unique role playing system. Sure, some things could have been done better and there's plenty of room for nitpicking, but at the end of the day, Disco Elysium is a fantastic game and a once in a lifetime experience that sets a new bar for video game writing. And as a result, I can't recommend it enough.
